Mendel 105 — Franklin K. Lane High School
November 26, 2022
Dear Mendel,
In January 1982 I got bounced from one high school to another again. Thomas Jefferson was in deep academic trouble, its student numbers were declining, the Department of Education closed its annex, teachers from the annex were reassigned to the main building, and I was looking for another school. Before going to Jefferson for the fall 1981 semester I was scheduled to go to another local high school, Franklin K. Lane. There was a vacancy there but at the last minute it was filled by someone with more seniority than me. This time the social studies chair was able to finagle a way to bring me in because he wanted me to start an advanced placement program in conjunction with one of the local colleges. Lane was also close to where we lived in Brooklyn and the Community Center and that spring I completed my PhD at Rutgers. The department chair, Barry Brody, wanted to call me Dr. Singer but I told him the only one permitted to call me doctor was you, my father. You got a big kick out of that.
Lane was an enormous WPA building towering over the whole community that was constructed during the Great Depression, partly as a work project to help the unemployed. One entrance was in Queens and the other was in Brooklyn. No one there actually knew who Franklin K. Lane was. I did some research and discovered Lane was United States Secretary of the Interior during World War I. He was from Canada and then California and lived in New York City briefly in the 1890s, so it is unclear why a New York City high school was named after him. Lane High School was in a strange location. Along was side was an elevated subway line that created a cavernous feel to the street and two sides were bordered by cemeteries. Before the school was built here the area was a racetrack.
While the student populations at Hughes and Jefferson were almost entirely African American, Lane was much more ethnically diverse. In the 1970s the school was closed because of a violent incident and poor student performance and then reopened with a new zone that included Black and Latino families from East New York and Bushwick, Brooklyn and white neighborhoods in Woodhaven and Glendale, Queens. Ideally the student population was supposed to be about half white and half Black and Latino. A strike by teachers at a local Catholic high school also sent additional white students to Lane, at least temporarily. Ideal and real often don’t match up and white families zoned for Lane found ways to avoid placement there and the Catholic school kids left when the teachers’ strike was over.
I was immediately at odds with the Lane Administration because it ran extra curricular activities to appeal to the declining white student population and viewed the advanced placement class as a place to quarantine the remaining white kids. When I set up the program I did it on the condition that I could interview any qualified student about joining and I did this to recruit Black and Latino students who initially didn’t think the class was a place for them.
By 1990 there were very few white students at Lane as the neighboring Woodhaven community became more Latino, largely Ecuadorian and Dominican, and Guyanese. The white families there either aged out so they didn’t have school-aged children or they sent their children to local religious schools.
During my initial visit to Lane, I was stopped in the corridor by the Assistant Principal for Administration. We introduced each other and he said he had heard a lot about me. I was “a very good teacher but a pain in the ass.” I confessed that both assessments were accurate, but I was a “package deal.” That pairing something I also learned from you.
I left Lane over thirty years ago. I am still in touch with a few of the students via email and I maintain friendships with some former colleagues.
Your son
Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.
